Carl Lewis
Michael Johnson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Carl Lewis leads 1 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Carl Lewis at #2 and Michael Johnson at #7.
The case for Carl Lewis
Voted Sportsman of the Century by the IOC, Lewis bridged sprinting and jumping like no one before or since. He won nine Olympic golds across four Games from 1984 to 1996, including the long jump at all four — a twelve-year reign in a single event — plus the 100m, 200m and sprint relays. His long-jump dominance was almost absurd: he went unbeaten in the event for a decade, winning 65 consecutive competitions between 1981 and 1991 before Mike Powell finally beat him with a world record. He added eight World Championship golds and a 100m world record of 9.86 in 1991. The knock on Lewis is that many of his sprint titles came in a doping-riddled era and that he never broke the long-jump world record himself, but his combination of range, longevity and championship temperament — he rarely lost when a medal was on the line — puts him second on nearly every serious list.
The case for Michael Johnson
Johnson ran with a bolt-upright, short-stride style that coaches said should not work and that no one could beat. In 1996 in Atlanta he became the only man to win the 200m and 400m at the same Olympics, and he did it by demolishing the 200m world record with 19.32 — a mark so far ahead of its time it stood for twelve years until Bolt. His 400m record of 43.18, set in 1999, lasted seventeen years. He won four Olympic golds and eight World Championship titles, and was never beaten in a 400m final at a global championship across a decade. Johnson turned the one-lap sprint into a discipline of controlled, even-paced power rather than lung-bursting panic, and his combination of the 200m and 400m in one body — two events with opposing demands — has no real parallel in the sport's history.